Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Or, How To Fix the "Unable to place a FastCGI process in a JobObject" / 0x80070005 Error When Applying a CPU Limit to an IIS7 Application Pool

Here is our example - you have a website that uses several different programming languages running on an IIS7 server. Perhaps your main site is running .NET, and you are using PHP for the website's blog, or Python for a mailing script. You have installed the FastCGI module to speed things up and have it configured successfully.Unfortunately, CPU utilization is overall fairly high for this site. You want to make sure that it doesn't get *too* high and crash the server, or overwhelm other applications and services you have running on the same server. This article assumes that you already have configured a dedicated application pool for your site, and per the best practices you are running the application pool under a unique application pool identity user, and not the Network Service. It also assumes that you only have one application pool configured for the site - handling both When you open task manager, quite a bit of the CPU utilization is being used by w3wp.exe processes - configuring FastCGI has the php-cgi.exe processes under control.You decide to configure CPU limits for the application pool. This can be accomplished by opening IIS Manager, selecting Application pools from the left hand side, selecting your application pool, clicking Advanced Settings and reconfiguring the values under the CPU header. At a minimum, you will need to set Action to KillW3wp, set a limit (the values are assigned in 1/1000th of 1 percent so don't forget to carry your decimal point!) and assign a reset interval to ensure the application pool is reset and not left in an off state during the few hours a week that you as a server administrator are allowed to sleep.Normally, this would work just fine. But with FastCGI applied to your site, PHP will become unresponsive, and provide the following error:* Unable to place a FastCGI process in a JobObject. Try disable the Application Pool CPU Limit feature * Error Number: 5 (0x80070005). * Error Description: Access is denied. In a nutshell, FastCGI places php-cgi.exe processes inside of job objects. The Windows Process Activation Service does the same thing when CPU limits have been applied. Having both active means that Windows will try to put one job object inside of the other, which is verboten. Fortunately, there is a hotfix available (KB970208) that prevents this nesting behavior from occurring. Download it here. After downloading, restart the server and the error should be resolved. Another alternative is implementing Windows Server Resource Manager. Arguably WSRM is the preferred solution, however it deserves its own (forthcoming) post, as WSRM capabilities extend way beyond a FastCGI band-aid.What about Windows Server 2003? Unfortunately, you are out of luck in that scenario in terms of an easy hotfix. For Windows Server 2003 users, it is necessary to segment FastCGI and non-CGI applications into different folders and create distinct application pools for both. Then you can manage CPU limiting features separately without issue.

About Me

Joshua Wieder has been a systems administrator for close to 10 years - specializing in data center and hosting infrastructure using redhat linux, cisco ios, vmware, KVM and containers such as docker and kubernetes. Get in touch with Josh Wieder here on Google+ or using one of the websites on the links page.